One quaint ceremony connected with New Year’s Day is the presentation to the Emperor, as he sits at table, of sausages and hard-boiled eggs by the “_Halloren_,” a guild of salt-workers living in Saxony, possessing peculiar customs, privileges and dress. It was the Princess who first introduced the “Halloren sausage” to my notice, for on the second or third day of the year, when the Court had returned to the New Palace, she burst into my room one morning with a very small sandwich--German sandwiches have bread on only one side of them--made of an extremely thin and delicate piece of pink sausage, which she presented to me with pride as a portion of her “Halloren sausage.” I was expected to eat it with great solemnity and a due appreciation of its marvellous merits, and I conscientiously tried to praise it, and declare that there was a “nameless something” about the flavour which marked it out from all other sausages. I subsequently discovered that it was a rare and special and not-to-be-repeated favour to share even the smallest piece of this wonderful delicacy. Every day this sausage appeared at breakfast and the eleven-o’clock lunch, but no one was then allowed to partake of it, with the exception of the Princess herself, and when a few days later we all went to Berlin for the rest of the winter the “Halloren sausage,” now sadly shrunk, was the one piece of luggage which the Princess insisted on taking in her own charge, carrying it carefully in a small black leather bag, and refusing to trust it to her footman, who she was convinced would leave it in the train or perhaps get it crushed or lost. Life in Berlin Schloss was very different to that in the New Palace. Every morning when lessons began again--the Christmas holidays are only ten days long in German schools--the Princess had to drive away with her lady at twenty minutes to eight to Bellevue Schloss, at the other side of the Tier-Garten, where her tutor attended from eight o’clock till twelve.